Reddening a little, Bessie answered him, laughingly; "Yes, you told me once before that you did not like my apron, and I know it would be out of place on your mother or Blanche, but it suits me, for you see I am housemaid here, and clear my own table and wash my own silver and china. Dorothy is old and has the rheumatism in her feet, and I must help; so, Mr. Aristocrat, if you do not wish to see me degrade myself, just go and take a walk, and when you come back the obnoxious apron shall be laid aside and we will practice that song you brought me."
Neil did not go out and walk, but staid in the dining-room and smoked his cigar, and looked at Bessie as she cleared away the breakfast dishes and washed the silver and china, with her sleeves drawn half-way to her elbows, showing her round, white arms.
"Yes, she is just suited to America, where, I believe, the women all wear aprons and wash their own dishes," Neil thought, as he watched her with a strange feeling in his heart of pain and happiness; happiness that for a few days at least she was his to look at, to love, to caress; pain that the days were so few and so short when he must leave her.
And then there arose before him, as in a vision, a picture of a quiet home amid green hedge-rows and sunny lanes, not a home such as Blanche's would be, with gorgeous surroundings and liveried servants everywhere, but such a home as makes a man better for living in it; a home where the housewifely Bessie was the presiding goddess, flitting about just as she was doing now, putting away the silver and china, brushing up the hearth, moving a chair here and another there, watering her pots of flowers in the conservatory, tea-roses and carnations and heliotrope and lilies all in bloom and filling the room with sweet perfume as if it were the summer-time, instead of chill December with its biting blasts sweeping against the windows.
"There!" Bessie said, at last, removing her apron, pulling down her sleeves, and smoothing her bright wavy hair, "I have dismissed the housemaid, and now I am ready to sing for you, or play chess, or do whatever you like."
But Neil was in no mood for singing or playing chess, or even talking much, and his fit of abstraction lasted all day, or until late in the afternoon, when Bessie began to speak of getting herself in readiness for Grey, who was to come in the evening train from Carnarvon. Then Neil roused, and as if he had nerved himself for the sacrifice, manifested a great deal of interest with regard to Bessie's personal appearance.